Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

For me, the two areas for change will be that of social media and performance based marketing. In this post I will look at the social media area and in part 2 will spend more time looking at performance based digital marketing.

2010, the year for getting (more) social

In my previous post, "A Year In Review: 2009 Chinese Digital Marketing Trends" I discussed how social media marketing was one of the more significant digital marketing areas being adopted and 'experimented' with. Just face it... in China we love our BBS and SNS services.

You just have to look at QQ, (when only usernames are concerned), is the biggest social network in the world. QQ today has over one billion usernames, but only one tenth of them are recurring visitors, topping at 91 million in Dec. 21. Without a doubt, QQ is the biggest player in China and will probably stay that way for a long time.

I believe that this coming year will see more interest from companies wanting to participate in 'social media'. This participation will see some poor examples as they learn social media is not a broadcast medium but will also see some more innovative, viral type campaigns as Chinese BBS and SNS extend to adopt the sharing functions we have seen in their Western counter parts.

Here is some Chinese specific social media predictions.
 

• Chinese government's content censorship policy will broaden to include some domestic BBS, SNS or Video Sites (in 2009 most Western SNS and micro-blogging sites were blocked)
• Social Commerce will develop;  a mixing of eCommerce and BBS/SNS meets (a kind of online shopping experience blended with real-time chat/engagement). This new area will emerge as user recommendations become increasing more important in the online purchase process
• Social Media Monitoring will become a requirement for most companies as user generated content becomes more viral and potentially more damaging to a corporates image (not to mention their products, services or company executives)
• Social network persona's will become portable (or at least this is my hope). I predict that I could build a profile on Tianya and my persona could be used easily among the social media's such as Douban or Quan360 (as examples) without re-friending everyone or developing 'new' profiles.
• Western SNS will look increasingly to their Chinese compatriots for 'inspiration'. We saw this with Facebook’s most popular social game of late, Farmville, which was entirely inspired by “Happy Farm.”

These are the areas in social media that I believe will become more evident in the next 12 months. What do you think? Please log in and post your comment below.